Heâs engraved in stone in the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC â back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For younger folks, itâs a bit of trivia that is an intrinsic part of American history and legend.
Anyone born between 1913 to about 1950, is very familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well knownâŚ.but everybody seemed to get into it. It was the fad of its time!
     At the National World War II Memorial in Washington, DC
In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, âSpeak to America,â sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real KilroyâŚ.now a larger-than-life legend of just-ended World War IIâŚ.offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.
Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had credible and verifiable evidence of his identity.
âKilroyâ was a 46-year old shipyard worker during World War II (1941-1945) who worked as a quality assurance checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts (a major shipbuilder for the United States Navy for a century until the 1980s). Â
His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. (Rivets held ships together before the advent of modern welding techniques.) Riveters were on piece work wagesâŚ.so they got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk (similar to crayon), so the rivets wouldnât be counted more than once.
                   A warship hull with rivets
When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would surreptitiously erase the mark. Later, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters!
One day Kilroyâs boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about unusually high wages being âearnedâ by riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on.Â
The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didnât lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added âKILROY WAS HERE!â in king-sized letters next to the checkâŚ.and eventually added the sketch of the guy with the long nose peering over the fenceâŚ.and that became part of the Kilroy message.
  Kilroyâs original shipyard inspection âtrademarkâ during World War II
Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.
Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With World War II on in full swing, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasnât time to paint them. As a result, Kilroyâs inspection âtrademarkâ was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.
His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over the European and the Pacific war zones.
Before warâs end, âKilroyâ had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.Â
To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had âbeen there first.â As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.
As World War II wore on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GIâs there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!
Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always âalready beenâ wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable. (It is said to now be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon by the American astronauts who walked there between 1969 and 1972.
In 1945, as World War II was ending, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Allied leaders Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill at the Potsdam Conference. Itâs first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), âWho is Kilroy?â
To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley carâŚ.which he attached to the Kilroy home and used to provide living quarters for six of the familyâs nine childrenâŚ.thereby solving what had become an acute housing crisis for the Kilroys.
           The new addition to the Kilroy family home.
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And the tradition continues into the 21st centuryâŚ
In 2011 outside the now-late-Osama Bin Ladenâs hideaway house in Abbottabad, PakistanâŚ.shortly after the al-Qaida-terrorist was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs.Â
>>Note: The Kilroy graffiti on the southwest wall of the Bin Laden compound pictured above was real (not digitally altered with Microsoft Paint, as postulated by some). The entire compound was leveled in 2012 for redevelopment by a Pakistani company as an amusement parkâŚ.and to avoid it becoming a shrine to Bin Ladenâs nefarious memory.
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My Dadâs trademark signature on cards, letters and notes to my sisters and I for the first 50 or so years of our lives (until we lost him to cancer) was to add the image of âKilroyâ at the end. We kids never ceased to get a thrill out of thisâŚ.even as we evolved into adulthood.Â
To this day, the âKilroyâ image brings back a vivid image of my awesome Dad into my headâŚ.and my heart!
Dad: This oneâs for you!
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